Dank Art Director is the anonymous art director behind the popular Instagram meme account of the same name, operating at the intersection of fashion, design, internet culture and chaos. Over the past nine years, he’s built a practice out of watching – and warping – how memes move, mutate and mean (or increasingly don’t mean) anything at all.

This interview lands just ahead of our next online FORUM, which will ask whether memes still matter today — pressure-testing meme culture as it exists right now, how it’s reshaping culture in real time and whether brands should be anywhere near it at all.

Protein: Which, if any, memes have stood the test of time?

Dank Art Director: Because memes are disposable, people don’t attach much depth to them, but they’re always based on something true and are nearly always revealing something. There are some that are really perennial and come back every year because things, sadly, don’t change. It’s like a design choice. I suppose good design just works. We’re still using Swiss grids in graphic design because they just work, and I think there’s maybe some very trite, weird parallel between good design and meme culture. Like the meme of the distracted boyfriend – we didn’t have that before a certain period, but once it came in, it was there to stay. We don’t need to improve on the Drake ones. They will work again and again and again.

Most of the time I don’t know where the original images come from and they’re all repurposed. I’m an art director by trade, so my job is making pictures, but I don’t think I could come up with these images myself. I’d overthink it.

There’s probably a Champions League of memes, and I think there’s a bunch that have phased out.

Protein: We’re in what some people are calling the “brain rot era” of memes – chaotic, nonsensical, absurdist. Do you think memes have lost meaning, or just changed how meaning works?

Dank Art Director: I think we’ve obviously oversaturated memes and they probably don’t mean anything. I think this generation of young people are chronically online and on their phones, and the fried memes are a perfect mirror to their understanding of the world. There’s no depth, I guess. And I’m sure there are very smart kids, but I think in mass this brainrot era is the result of a sloppy approach to internet usage and consuming content. It’s like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.

So much of internet culture nowadays seems to be about being offensive, and it’s all manosphere-adjacent. It’s all about rating or berating each other. And it’s not actually funny. It feels like the changing rooms in Year 9, but now it’s just on the internet.

Protein: Do you think memes are something we should take seriously? And what do they reveal about the state of culture?

Dank Art Director: The problem with memes is their success and their failure is the same problem – they’re very face value. They’re meant to be face value. For success, you just have to see it and share it; it’s a gut thing. It has to be relevant.